3 tips to extend the life of your content

Your blog post’s lifespan doesn’t have to be limited to the day you post it. Keep your content relevant and shareable with these tips.

By Stacey AceveroOct. 4, 2012

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Success! You took the time to carefully craft a blog post, press release, or other content item that skillfully displays your thought leadership. You’re positive it will go viral.

The moment you hit the “publish” button, you hit the social sharing buttons. You wait for more shares, but nothing happens.

Maybe you didn’t tweet at an optimal time, or your title didn’t appeal to your audience. All of that work, and you feel like no one saw it.

Don’t give up!

I’ve had this happen to me several times, and I finally found a way to extend the life and reach of content with a few simple tweaks:

1. Get creative with your tweets.

Don’t just re-share a headline. Say you originally titled your post, “Five questions to ask customers to improve your content marketing.” The next time you share it, switch the front and back parts of the title to make two parts:

“Improve your content marketing: Five questions to ask customers”

For another social share, change the title into a question to solicit a response from your audience:

“Customers should dictate your content marketing efforts—what to ask them to get it right”

2. Find the most compelling content in the body.

Pull the best sentences from your content—a statistic, your lede, or your concluding sentence are often creative places to look for new headlines that can hook readers and make them click.

Check out the red snippets in the blog post below. They are all great, shareable titles:

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3. Change the way you share the content.

It’s obvious you want to share your content through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. However, some commonly overlooked and much more creative ways to share include reformatting your content for Slideshare or Pinterest.

On Pinterest, we take snippets from our blog posts and visualize them in brand colors with a link back to the post they came from. This helps create evergreen—timeless—content from posts that may otherwise be dated.

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On SlideShare, we create short decks that we may materialize as a blog idea that doesn’t require much text. Here, we detailed five ideas for creative Facebook posts—an evergreen post that we can embed in many places, including related posts on our site.

Don’t put your content on the shelf after just a day. Creatively mix the ways and platforms you share it on to increase its shareability and effectiveness.

Don’t forget to take your time with content—it doesn’t have to reach 1,000 shares in one day. We often see posts with just a few shares early on that get a ton of reads later due to some creative repositioning in the online sphere.

Stacey Acevero is the social media manager at Vocus, where a version of this article originally appeared.